Vanishing Act
by Eliza4892
Summary: Meredith's always trying to disappear.


This needs to stop. She needs to stop.

---

"Bath time, Meredith," her father calls, and she rises from the floor of her room, puts down her dolls, goes towards the room slowly, hesitating.

Meredith is only three years old and she already knows this routine. If she was normal it would be her mother calling her for bath time. But it's not, and it never has been. Always her dad.

"When's mommy coming home?" She asks, from underneath lavender scented bubbles, her voice tiny. She feels bad about asking, she feels guilty. It's not that she doesn't love her father, it's just that she misses her mother.

He gets that tired look on his face, the same one he gets when he stands in front of the OR board at the hospital where her mother works, searching for her mother – his wife's – name. That's also part of the routine, and it's usually when he informs her that her mother won't be home in time for dinner. Or to tuck her in. Or at all that day.

"Mommy's busy sweetheart, she won't be home until later."

She sighs heavily, catching the tinge of sadness on his face. Sometimes she thinks it would be easier if she just wasn't here.

---

Meredith wants to disappear.

That morning, sitting in her bathtub, that's what she's thinking about, as she stares at the bright fluorescent lights. She's contemplating ways to slip away, quietly, so that no one is ever the wiser.

This, she thinks, is because everyone sees her, except for the one person she really wants to see her. Her mother. And when she finally did take notice of her, realize that she was there and was living her life, all that she had was criticism. The only words she had for her were ones about how she was wasting her life, her talent. Then she was gone, and Meredith was stuck pouring her heart out to a ghost.

So, Meredith has decided that she needs to disappear as well.

---

Her school's next to a YMCA so they go swimming in the warmer months, though it didn't really matter what temperature it was outside because the pool is indoors. The teacher tells her that it's because they can't take a bunch of wet kids out into the cold, and not expect them to catch hypothermia. She doesn't know what that is.

She sticks to the shallows, keeps hold of those brightly colored foam noodles, and spends more time talking to her friends than swimming.

No one ever notices that she can't swim. She was never taught by anyone, no one ever had the time to take her back and forth to lessons. Meredith's been taking the school bus to and from school since she was five and her father left; she walks everywhere else. If her mother knew about her only daughter, barely ten, walking a mile to a friend's house and then back again, she might get mad. But she never takes enough notice of Meredith for it to occur to her.

---

She slips down further into the tub, just so that the warm water comes up to her shoulders now, but then she doesn't stop, she just keeps going. It's not really a conscious decision; it's just something that kind of happens, which is becoming a theme in her life.

The water comes up to her neck, and then her chin. She doesn't bother taking a breath, before she lets herself become completely submerged. Her hand grips the cool porcelain of the edge of the tub, like it's the railing going around the shallows at the YMCA, and in an instant she lets go, and closes her eyes.

This is her vanishing act.

---

Meredith's love affair with tequila does not start the year she becomes an intern. No, that begins the summer of her junior year of high school.

Her summer fling of this year (and last year as a matter of fact), Ian, has a bottle of it in his car, which passes back and forth between his hands, and those of his friend Daniel's. They haven't been doing this for ten minutes before she grabs the bottle out of Ian's hands and takes a swig of it like she's an old pro.

An hour later she's feeling heady and invincible. When Daniel proposes they go for a swim, it sounds like the best idea yet, and she strips down to her bra, and her shorts without complaint. She watches him stand on the edge of a cliff that most of the locals use as a diving board. It isn't high up, maybe seven or eight feet. It's a beach, and the water is more than deep enough.

She watches him dive gracefully into the water, surfacing seconds later, and coaxing them all down there. Janie, Daniel's girlfriend, and the only sober one there refuses, and settles for just watching them. If Meredith hadn't been inebriated she probably would've done the same thing, and let the boys have their fun. But at the moment Meredith feels like she could take on the world and anyone in it.

Standing on the edge of the cliff, she looks down at the still waters below her, hears Daniel, and now Ian, egging her on to jump. _I can't swim, _she thinks to herself, intimidated by the liquid that beckons, lit to almost a silver color by the moon. They'd made it look so easy. Just jump in, and kick your way back up to the surface. How hard was that?

Sucking in a breath, she jumps.

---

The darkness made that relaxed, calm state she'd been enjoying slip away, and she opens her eyes, looking up. It took her eyes a minute to adjust but when they do she sees everything through blue tinted goggles.

It's a weird perspective, and she wonders if this is how the fish feel, if everything is blue and shaky for them too.

Then Derek's face appears in her line of sight.

---

When she hits the water, she isn't prepared and she takes in a breath that makes her lungs burn. It freaks her out, and when she goes to kick, to try to move upwards, she finds it doesn't work and all she's doing is running out of energy.

She coughs, only swallowing more water, and she knows she's sinking further down, but there's nothing she can do to stop it.

Ian's face, as he goes back under the water looking for her, is the last thing she sees before her eyes close.

---

Derek's arms reach into the tub, and he grabs onto her firmly, pulling her out by the upper arms, and she sucks in a breath while she's still under. That same burning sensation, that's all too familiar, makes her lungs ache.

"What are you doing?" He asks, face close to hers, and he seems half-concerned, half-angry, so she puts on an embarrassed smile that probably doesn't really fool him. He cups her chin for a second, like he's making sure she's alright and he can leave her alone. He must decide she is because he walks away, though she knows that's not the end of this.

She can't just slip away with him around; she can't disappear, even for a little while, because he's always, _always, _there. That on its own is more suffocating then the water is.

---

The next time her eyes open she's on the shore, and Daniel's face is inches away from hers. He had to give her CPR it turns out, because he was the only one who knew how.

"What happened out there?" Ian asks, from the other side of her, looking at her with what passes for a worried expression on him.

Meredith tries to think of an answer that doesn't sound so pathetic, so stupid, but she can't come up with anything. She's too out of it, her heart is racing far too fast for crafty lies. "I can't swim."

She lays there in the sand long after the others have gotten up, and she can tell they're getting ready to leave, but still she doesn't move. She almost wishes they'd just left her in the water, now that she's seen how easy it is too disappear. She could've been gone, that could've been it. No more crap from her mother about grades and not living up to expectations. No more wondering why she got dealt this lot in life. Just the water, the ocean. Darkness.

It doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

---

It all comes back to her as she hits the water, this time not voluntarily, knocked backwards by the force of the injured man's movement. The burning, the blurry vision, the feeling she gets as she sinks.

It's ironic that, after all her failed attempts, now she truly has disappeared.

---


End file.
